Hear, hear! Your last sentence sums it up perfectly.

Guess what everyone who's complaining about Free Realms? You're not its target audience. Its target audience consists of young gamers and the parents or relatives of young gamers. I have a 10 year old brother who was given an account by my parents and they asked me, age 27, to play with him. Know what? We have fun doing so. Is it a hardcore MMO I could play every day? Of course not. But it is exactly what it's trying to be; a casual game marketed to kids and families.

Free Realms may be great, but we have no idea as to how many subscribers it has because there is no trusted transparent reporting mechanism for sub numbers. Calling people "trolls" who want more transparency in the industry and the industry's media is just perpetuating the problem.

@Hardy: Don't forget the pedo argument, Thac0 should be around soon to share that with us.

@Temploiter: I agree that there needs to be legitimate reporting for numbers, I don't feel many report them properly. Blizzard is a big one I am pretty sure fudges the numbers. Would be nice if there was a standard way of reporting the numbers that was validated.

Blizzard cannot possibly "fudge their numbers". Activision Blizzard, as well as its publisher VU, are both publicly traded companies. That makes faking your numbers not only nigh on impossible, but also phenomenally stupid.
That doesn't have any impact on this story however. 2 million accounts in about a month is pretty good growth, even if only a fraction of those players ever log on again.

@ Halldorr >_< I know you love me!

@Tyranor

There is a big difference between 'fudging' your numbers and faking them.

Faking is making them up, which as you said would be completely illegal as a publicly traded company. (Not like it's stopped a lot of other, larger companies from doing it.)

'Fudging' is toying with the figures to make them look as good as possible without lying, ESPECIALLY for their stockholders. This is common practice.

I haven't personally gone over any Blizzard financial reports (I would be shocked if any of us have), so I don't really know to what extent they are being fudged, or even what the 12 million figure is labeled as. "Active paying subscribers", "Active Paying subscribers last quarter/half/year/total"? I really could care less. Even throwing out the whacky Asian market, WoW is still FAR and away the most popular MMO in the US and Europe....no one can deny that. It doesn't really matter if they have 12 or 11 million..no one else is even close.

I really don't understand why anyone is trying to compare the two. Throwing out the completely different payment model, the games are hardly similar. The combat is only about 1/3rd of Free Realms' total content, and is greatly simplified, even compared to WoW. (Seriously, each combat class has FOUR abilities).